Migration/Personal Identity – an Empiricist Poem (1988/2014)

Filling another suitcase and checking the weather over there…
Anticipations of a new beginning.
Who will ‘I’ be
there, re-located –
dislocated?

The mossy self seeps into its surroundings,
or they infiltrate.
How many transplants can it sustain?
How thin can its thread be stretched?

The risk of making the wrong place ‘here’
loosens roots.

Balanced precariously at a point of displacement
weightless
vanishingly small
.

But with the ramifications of passing time,
milestones like anchors, accumulate in memory.
A liquid, floating self emulsifies, nacreous,
coiled around the gritty concretions
of however many ‘here’s and ‘now’s.